Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

scow had already signed a similar one with me, he was from the beginning favorably dis- posed, especially so since it was their first contract. He desired to study the points in detail, not being very well acquainted as yet with the Riga contract. The rest of the day and the night were used by the translators to put the contract into typewritten Russian. During some of these conversations the head of the Ukrainian Red Cross was present. That organization was recommended in a tentative way as a most suitable and experienced apparatus to distribute our supplies. There was no attempt to push us into the open arms of this organization, smiling its most fascinating and encour- aging invitation, but it was made clear that such an ar- rangement would be more than heartily welcomed. I thanked them just as heartily for their kind consideration and desire to relieve us as much as possible of the burden of distribution, but pointed out that our policy of work 160 FEEDING THE HUNGRY precluded that method. They knew that the Nansen organization had arranged to distribute through Russian committees. They informed us, to our astonishment, and with evident self-satisfaction, that they also were taking part in the relief activities in the Volga valley. We were thus all in the same class. We were offering to help them, and they were already helping elsewhere. ‘That gave them a kind of kinship with the humanitarian Americans. The famine in the Volga districts had been widely advertised. Its appeal was dramatic. How comradely they felt in sending help from the sister Soviet state! They loved to talk of the fine things they were doing, but their own starving masses—oh yes, they were filled with pity for them, too, and some one must go to their aid; but the opportunity to record that the Ukrainian proletariat came to the rescue when the Volga population was famishing, that must not be lost. So the Ukraine kept on sending supplies across its borders even when starvation at home had actually become acute. Ukrainian Gubernias (states)! adopted certain Volga regions and were then supposed to provide food for them, even if some of their own people were at the same time starving. However impractical, if not unjust, such a plan seems to us, there was some keen psychology back of it. It gave opportunity for a grand dramatic gesture. It helped to bind the groups together. For more than a year there had been no warring with a Denikin or a Wrangel or with Poles, against whom they could unite. But union was necessary. The famine offered once again a rallying slogan. Their Government would be doing a splendid humanitarian service. It was far more theatrical to de- scribe the horrors of famine in another state, and arouse sympathy for the sufferers, than to face it at home and meet its demands. UNSEALING THE CLOSED DOOR 161 The next day I met Christian Racovsky, the Chair- man of the Council of Peoples Commissa